PyCon 2025

[aleteoryx]

so, somewhat on impulse, I went to PyCon this year! this is the post on that. it took a while because I wanted to give some insight into racist development policies in Pittsburgh, before ultimately concluding that, while I can talk about these things casually, I cannot write intelligently on them.

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so, it's hosted in Pittsburgh, specifically the David L. Lawrence convention center(DLLCC). DLLCC is a great venue! it's sited well, overlooking the Allegheny River, and its design makes it really cool from the ground. the ground floor is basically empty, but for parking and offices, and there's a large tunnel splitting it in half.

the real venue is the second floor and up, consisting of several large halls, like 30 rooms for talks and such, a rooftop gathering area, and lots of common space to eat, chat, etc. it's nice.

given this is such a swanky structure, one might wonder, who, pray tell, is it named for?

Urban Renewal means Negro Removal.

David Leo Lawrence was a racist fuck. as stated in the intro, I won't spend much time on this, but under him Pittsburgh's URA (Urban Renewal Authority) was created. it, and he, destroyed the homes, livelihoods, and community of thousands of people, primarily black, in the Hill District. more info

it is disgusting that he is remembered as some great urbanist and not the man who ruined lives and destroyed communities. it is a sin that his name is pasted on anything great or excellent, and that the convention center doesn't have a placard apologizing for his actions.

such is usonian redevelopment. sigh.

The Expo Hall

...was nice! lots of good booths. well, good in terms of "a lot of cardboard".

amazon had theirs styled like it was an airport lounge, microsoft set up an espresso bar (I did not give patronage, or there would be paragraphs of snobbery here), and several others just had large central pillars. I assume those booths cost more, cause the vast majority were the standard folding table / black curtain backdrop.

in the expo hall, several companies showed off the same Intro to ML assignment: taking a photo and picking a celebrity you look like through vector search. it was mildly entertaining when I did it at the MongoDB booth, and then just a bit sad once I realized that maybe 1/5 of all the companies there just had an employee make the same thing.

the expo hall's startup row was full of genAI companies. some, like gooey.ai, had genuinely interesting applications (translating and summarizing technical literature for third world countries) (jesus christ, what the fuck is this planet, why is there such a fucking deficit in basic outreach that this could fill potential need) (what if this gets used as a reason to underfund actual medical outreach?) (is the risk of death by LLM hallucination less than the risk of death without this system?). quite a few, though, were businesses that seem doomed the moment VCs find a new bell to salivate at.

of course, bankers and hedgefunds turned out in droves too. Capital One, Bloomberg, and some smaller ones you've never heard of. I got a great waterbottle from one, and I lost it, and I miss her every day :( .

there were other interesting booths.

• anvil is a web-based IDE for writing webapps in pure python, with a transpiler for the frontend. I don't love it but it's very polished. it's for python shops, so they don't need to train on another language to make dashboards and panels.
• temporal is a job runner that makes jobs resumable by wrapping certain things in calls to the temporal backend. if a job crashes, it is rerun, and fed data from the previous execution.
• wagtail is a CMS package for django. it's meant to work as the glue between the development team, styling team, and content teams of an organization. one of my orgs is now in the process of moving our old website to it.

food

at the back of the expo hall, at noon each day, food was served buffet-style. it was pretty good, if a bit poor for dietary restrictions. the racial disparity between the con-goers and the catering staff was striking.

expo hall stories

one of the guys at the QRT (a hedgefund) booth was cute. he explained his company, and when I explained what I do (IT for local nonprofits), his response was something to the effect of "yeah, you guys are doing important work." he phrased it in a way where we were specifically important, compared to him. I don't know precisely what he thinks of his job, but I think he thinks he's doing the right thing. I didn't want to get into an argument with him (he was cute), so I walked off shortly after. it's so sad how these folks can honestly think they're good people, or that they benefit the world.

duolingo were no-shows for the first day and a half, and someone left a note. it was undisturbed until their people got there.

I had some good conversations, and managed to articulate a lot of my issues with generative AI in general. a particularly interesting conversation with the man in charge of startup row was, unfortunately, cut short.

Cory Doctorow

seeing him speak live was a large me buying a ticket. it was the standard cory doctorow fare. he shittalked half the companies in the expo hall, talked about how social media has gone to shit, etc. and about how generative AI is ushering in The Horrors.

in the time between when I first evaluated doctorow's opinions, and when I saw him speak, I got into permacomputing, and fundamentally re-evaluated my relationship with technology. my issue with Doctorow is that he seems to think that the main problem with the modern world is social, and that if we eliminated the social issues we could fundamentally keep going the way we are now. and that's not the case.

so it was a bit disappointing to realize that I had gone more radical than him. :/

still, it was a good talk, though the slides weren't matched well to what he was saying. also, I haven't ever taken the time to stalk his opinions in depth, so I might be misrepresenting him.

Talks

not much to say here. most of the ones I went to were good. I was pretty disappointed by a talk about "reducing the environmental impact of code", that turned out to actually be about ML model optimization.

anyways,

that's all I really have to say. sorry this took a bit to get out the door, I procrastinated a lot once explicating upon The Horrors of Pittsburgh became a goal.

I probably won't be attending PyCon again. the influence of Big Evil was too strong and it seemed mostly for genAI cultists. but it was a good time overall.

alright maybe ill do a post like this for this tekko anyways

that's all, ~aleteoryx